Julien Cristau sent an
update on
Release Team activities, announcing the start of the final stage of
the freeze.
This basically means that from now on, there will be an even stricter policy
on the changes that can be uploaded (only fixes for release critical bugs
will be accepted) and that the Release Team will start to apply a specific usertag
(wheezy-will-remove)
to mark packages that will be removed from the upcoming stable release if their RC bugs
aren't fixed.
In addition, Julien gave a reminder that help is needed to finalise the Release Notes:
all users and contributors are invited to check the
work in progress and
help with the current issues.

Martin Zobel-Helas sent some bits
from the Debian Systems Administration team (DSA) in which he
reported on the recent activities of the team.
In recent months, they have focused on the virtualisation of
a number of physical machines, creating some ganeti clusters
to manage the various virtual machines.
In addition to that, the team has begun a rewrite of its account management code
base using the Django framework.
The mail ends with the thanks of the DSA team to all the
donors and hosting partners
(and especially Eaton and Brainfood) as well as the ganeti
package maintainers, Iustin Pop and Guido Trotter.

Didier Raboud announced matching funding for donations to DebConf13.
As part of the DebConf13 fundraising effort, a generous sponsor,
Brandorr Group, has proposed to
match USD donations to DebConf13 until 30 April explained Didier.
Through this mechanism, for each dollar donated by an individual to DebConf13, Brandorr Group will
donate another dollar. Individual donations will be matched only up to 100 USD each;
only donations in USD will be matched, and Brandorr Group will match the donated funds up to a
maximum total of 5,000 USD.
This initiative will continue until Tuesday 30 April; spread the word!
For further details, you can check the donations webpage.

Enrico Zini blogged
about the gender imbalance in the New Maintainer process.
Enrico noted that we
still have very few women applicants, despite previous efforts to
encourage them to apply, including by the
Debian Women project. He
therefore proposed that we adopt an affirmative action approach, and
only allow one male candidate to apply for every female one.
Since the goal is to have an equal gender perception in Debian, we
can just decide to only approve one obviously-male-named DD for every
obviously-female-named one, said Enrico.
That's right: no new obviously-male-named DD
unless an obviously-female-named DD has just been approved.

Francesca Ciceri proposed a constitutional
amendment about changing our election system.
She pointed out the large amount of time
wasted in election discussions each year, and the problems in
tricking other project members into running. The proposed amendment
would cancel the current election process, and instead make Stefano
Zacchiroli DPL for life.
Democratic processes are one of Debian distinguishing traits, but
over the years we have learned not to abuse them, in particular when
they risk getting in the way of decision efficiency, commented
Stefano Zacchiroli, current Debian Project Leader.
I'm flattered of being proposed as "DPL for life" and, if the
resolution will pass, I'll do my best to always listen
to suggestions from Debian project members in spite of the lack of
elections.

Following the recent announcement
encouraging use of Debian's trademarks, some of the first new
merchandising products featuring Debian branding have been
announced. These range from a new version of the famous Debian
umbrellas designed for pets and plush toys of your favourite Debian
developers to Debian-branded bug squashing spray (fully approved for
use with organic crops) and Debian Flame-Away™ calming drugs.

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian Wheezy, is currently affected by 50 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 24 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

Debian's Security Team recently released
advisories for these packages (among others):
smokeping,
libxml2,
icinga,
rails and
bind9.
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the package:
clamav.
Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing
list (and the separate backports
list, and stable updates
list) for announcements.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.